While cleaning house gutters of leaves and other debris remains a task that few look forward to doing, failure to do so can cause major issues for a home. Blockages can, for example, cause water to pour over the sides of a gutter and pool around the foundation of the house. This water can cause the foundation to crack and can lead to the growth of mold. In colder weather, a blocked gutter can form an ice dam, a ridge of ice that forms at the edge of a roof and prevents melting snow from draining off the roof. The backed-up water can eventually leak into the home, causing damage to walls, ceilings, insulation, and other areas.
Gutters are conventionally cleaned by getting on a ladder and manually removing the debris. Unfortunately, falls from ladders are quite common, and hundreds of injuries and deaths result every year as a result. Solutions that do not require accessing a gutter by ladder typically involve attaching long tubular attachments to leaf blowers, dry vacuums, or pressure washers. However, these attachments remain difficult to use. Almost all gutters include hangers (e.g., bracket hangers, spike-and-ferrule hangers) that transversely span the gutters at regular intervals and act to attach the gutters to their roofs. Conventional attachments get hung-up on these hangers. As a result, the nozzle-end of an attachment must be essentially lifted out of a gutter every time one of these hangers is encountered and then replaced back into the gutter after the hanger is traversed. Such repeated manipulations can be difficult when controlling the distal end of the attachment from the ground via a long run of tubing.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for new apparatus and methods that allow gutters to be effectively cleaned in an easy and safe manner while addressing the above-identified deficiencies associated with already-existing solutions.